


home again

by dilkirani



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fitz misses his mom, Fluff, Post-Season/Series 03, Pre-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 17:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7062226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilkirani/pseuds/dilkirani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leopold Fitz hasn’t stopped moving in five months and suddenly all he wants is his mum.<br/>(The two times Fitz visits his mum this year.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	home again

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone else obsessed with the x-files? The first part is inspired by the scene where Scully walks all the way to her mom’s house and cries in her arms. All of my babies are such badasses, but sometimes they just need their moms ya know?  
> All my love and thanks to itsavolcano for the beta and for always texting me fitzsimmons/IDC related things!

_One._

Once again, he has expended all of his energy and resources on a dead-end. Every time he thinks he has become completely numb, that there’s nothing left of his heart to shatter, and every time he is proven spectacularly wrong. Bobbi promised to cover for him until tomorrow evening and he’s tempted to spend the night passed out in the back of a pub somewhere. He’s never done that before, but it sounds like such a relief. He’s so very weary.

Instead, he finds himself driving down a road he hasn’t traveled in years. The lights are out in the modest home and he realizes it’s almost 2am. She’ll have been asleep for hours.

But Leopold Fitz hasn’t stopped moving in five months and suddenly all he wants is his mum.

++

He rings the doorbell incessantly until the house gradually lights up. He hears her gasp as she looks through the peephole. When she throws the door open, she crushes him into a hug before he can say anything. And just like that, he’s sobbing.

The last time he cried this hard in his mother’s arms he had just found out his dad wasn’t ever coming back. At the time, he couldn’t imagine anything else in the universe that would hurt that bad.

Linda makes him tea while he sprawls on the sofa, limbs askew and eyes painfully puffy. His breathing is still labored and he briefly wonders if he might be having a panic attack. Jemma would know. He closes his eyes and recites the digits of pi. His mum will sort him out; that’s what she does.

She sets the tea on a table next to him and he reaches for it gratefully. While he drinks, she strokes his hair, commenting on how short it is.

“Why haven’t you been by sooner, Leo?”

He shrugs. “Too dangerous. Everythin’… it’s just happened so fast. And uh, I was in an accident last year. Nearly drowned.”

He hadn’t meant to tell her now, maybe not ever. He’s learned to live with his disability. She might not even have noticed. He rests his bad hand in hers, by way of further explanation, and she massages it as the tremors start up.

“You stopped calling. You didn’t say anything, in all your letters.” Her eyes are shimmering. Fitz can’t stand seeing his mum cry, knowing it’s all his fault. Guilt suffocates him.

“I wasn’t… so good with words. For a long time. I didn’t want to worry you. And… I didn’t want you to look at me differently.”

“Oh, Leo,” she says, in the same exasperated voice she’s been using since he was two years old and getting into everything he wasn’t supposed to. “I’ve always been so proud of your heart. Nothing that’s happened to you will change that.”

She continues stroking his hair soothingly and Fitz realizes just how much he’s missed her. They had always been close; it had been just the two of them for so long. She hadn’t cried when he’d left for SHIELD, not in front of him at any rate, so he’d tried to be brave too. But he had spent uncountable nights with his face pressed against his pillow, drowning himself in silent tears.

“You’re not here because of your accident, are you?”

He shakes his head, feeling his lungs constricting again.

“Where’s Jemma?” she asks, and he knows she’s been wanting to ask since he showed up crying on her doorstep without his constant by his side.

He tries his best without giving out classified information. MIA, haven’t had any sign in months, chasing dead ends, and—“We had a date. I mean, we sort of, we had kind of talked about maybe… so I asked her to dinner, somewhere nice, and I was looking up restaurants, I found this Italian place that sounded so, it would’ve been perfect, and then she was just gone—”

He breaks off with great, hiccuping sobs, and he’s sloshing tea all over the couch, apologizing for everything he’s ever done wrong, which is everything—he’s done _everything_ wrong.

Linda takes the cup from him and holds him for a long time, rubbing circles on his back and murmuring assurances he can’t understand but which quiet his mind all the same. Eventually, she leads him upstairs to his old room. The small part of his brain that’s still cognizant is amazed at the strength of this woman who’s practically carrying her grown son. Someday he’ll visit with good news, and he’ll take her out, and they’ll be happy. It might be twenty years from now, but he’ll come back when he’s able to laugh again. When he won’t be her burden anymore.

His bedroom looks like it hasn’t been touched since the last time he’d been home; physics books are still stacked up by the bed, the same old posters are still peeling from the walls. There’s a graduation photo of him and Jemma on his dresser that he doesn’t remember seeing before. His mum must’ve framed it. For some reason, it calms him down. He’s smirking in the picture but Jemma has thrown her arms around him, mid-laugh. He remembers exactly how he felt in that moment and realizes he’s been in love with her this whole time.

He will never give up but he’s starting to lose faith in himself, in his ability to find her. He places the photo next to his bed and stares at it until he falls asleep. It’s a reminder that there once existed a version of themselves bright and happy and incandescent. He needs to hold onto that for Jemma, wherever she is.

++

_Two_.

Fitz is already in bed by the time Jemma leaves the lab. She’d been so close to finishing up Coulson’s latest project that she’d skipped dinner and worked much later than she’d intended.

The lights are all out, but when she changes and crawls into bed she sees that he hasn’t fallen asleep yet.

“Fitz?” she whispers, running her fingers along his cheek. “What’s wrong?”

He turns and nuzzles his face into her shoulder. There might be another universe in which she never experiences domesticity with Fitz and she feels painfully heartbroken for this unknown alternate version of herself.

“I miss my mum,” he says at last, and she’s instantly pulled back over a decade, sitting on the floor beside the bed of a pasty, achingly shy sixteen-year-old boy who is so incredibly homesick.

She hadn’t known what to do for him then, but now she kisses him and wipes the few tears that have fallen with the pads of her thumbs. “I miss her too,” she answers, and it’s the truth. Fitz’s mum had welcomed her into their tiny family immediately. “Did something happen?”

“No,” he sighs. “It’s stupid.”

“Fitz,” she admonishes gently.

“It’s just that, I’ve been feeling so happy, you know? About us. And I was thinking… she’d be so excited. She used to make comments—not often, because she knew it bothered me—but she was always wanting me to invite you to stay with us. The last time I saw her, you were… gone. Anyway, yeah. I just miss her, is all.”

“We should go,” she says, as if it’s the easiest and most obvious answer.

“What, now?”

“Well, not right now. But I bet Coulson would let us go for a visit in a week or so. It’s remarkably slow, and we never take vacation. I think we’ve earned it after Hive.”

Fitz stares at her with unmasked adoration, and she’s glad for the darkness because sometimes it’s still too much for her to see without feeling like she doesn’t deserve any of this.

“You’ll come with me?”

She kisses his forehead and wraps her arms tightly around his waist. “Of course. Like I’d miss seeing your mum. Or trust you to bring back any of her biscuits for me.” _What wouldn’t I do for you?_ she thinks.

++

Jemma loves her own parents, but being with Fitz and his mum feels like fitting into the family she was always meant to have—like she can, after all, go home again. She’s wrapped up with Fitz in a quilt on the floor, watching TV until Linda dozes off in an armchair. Her abs hurt from laughing so hard at dinner, and she suddenly thinks about Perthshire, about being within driving distance of Linda. About the way she would love their children. She knows she’s getting ahead of herself—they have so much left to do before that stage—but she’s oddly peaceful. As if, for once, she won’t need to prepare for the future because it’s been here the entire time, waiting until she was ready.

They help a slightly grumpy Linda to her own room and Jemma can’t help giggling softly. His mother never resembles Fitz so much as when she’s been woken from a contented sleep.

In Fitz’s room, Jemma picks up their graduation photo as she slides into bed. “I remember this,” she says, tilting it so he can see. “You know, I think I had a bit of a crush on you at the time,” she admits, hindsight clarifying her previously messy emotions.

He laughs. “Well, that’s fine, but I was pretty much in love with you by then.”

“You were not! Remember how you had a huge crush on Courtney earlier that year? Kept trying to impress her even after she and Simon got engaged? And what was her name, Priya? And then Daisy, of course.” Mere months ago she might have been embarrassed at accidentally revealing just how much she’d paid attention to Fitz’s love life, but she has everything she wants now and no longer minds being vulnerable with him. He has always kept her heart safe.

Fitz shrugs. “I guess I didn’t realize what I was feeling, and I wouldn’t have wanted to ruin our partnership anyway. It never seemed possible with you, and that was okay because I thought our friendship was perfect. But when I saw that picture, I knew that’s what I’d felt.”

Jemma carefully places the frame back on the nightstand and rolls over to face the ceiling, her eyes catching the glow-in-the-dark constellations she’d helped him put up a lifetime ago. She couldn’t have predicted any of this back then, when they were celebrating their achievements and drunk off the possibilities stretching out before them. But she had known that wherever she went, he would be the most important part of her life, in whatever capacity.

She turns toward him in time to see his eyes drifting shut and smiles. “We used to stay up all night talking when I’d visit you here,” she reminds him, and he laughs.

“Yeah, that’s before we got old and started working for this no-longer-flying circus.”

“But it was fun! I miss those days.”

“Jemma, we talk all the time. We could, however, stay up all night doing… _other things_.” She has no idea how Fitz can be so immature and yet impossibly attractive all at once.

“Leopold Fitz! In your mother’s house! When she’s just down the hall!”

Fitz laughs again, rubbing his cold nose against her neck and causing her to gasp. “She’s been trying to get us together for years, and she’s never been subtle. Remember how she was renovating the guest room for three years so you had to stay in here? It looks exactly the same as before.”

Jemma ponders this new information before quickly shoving her freezing hands underneath his shirt. He hisses loudly.

“I hate you, Jemma. You’re the worst.”

“You love me, and I’m the best.”

He leans over, capturing her hands and holding them above her head, away from him. He kisses her deeply, and she whimpers. “You _are_ the best,” he whispers, when he breaks contact to breathe. “And I do love you.”

They’re crammed into his childhood twin bed in a house that never seems to be warm enough, and she’s never been happier.

“Thanks for coming home with me,” he says, peppering kisses along her jawline.

She runs her fingers through his hair, marveling at how intimately she knows him now and what a privilege it is. “You are my home, Fitz,” she says. “I’ll go with you anywhere. And I’ll stop with you anywhere, too.”

He’ll know what she’s trying to express. And someday, when they’re both ready, he’ll ask her to stay.


End file.
